Jarrett House North

On today’s Highlights® for Home Improvement Geeks™, we have the story of Goofus and Gallant and the Undersized Doorway! Read along:

• Gallant starts with detailed plans for his (and her) charming bungalow renovation.
• Goofus buys not one, but two refrigerators that won’t fit through the $#!@#$ kitchen door!
• Gallant strips an entire floor down to bare wood to lay it out the way he and she want it.
• Goofus rips out a door jamb using a prybar and a brand-new reciprocating saw so that the smallest kitchen door opening goes from 27″ to 30.5″—hopefully enough for a new fridge.

In all seriousness, here’s how it went down. As I laid out in my last update, the plan was to remove a little trim from the doorway to widen the opening. The way this normally goes is: use a putty knife or razor blade to cut the paint away from the joint between the stop molding (the strips of wood that the door rests against when it’s closed) and then slip a prybar in to strip the stop molding out.

Had this been a normal house, that’s how it would have gone.

Instead, we have Überhaus. Built way beyond contemporary standards by a highly responsible builder in 1941. In this case, this means the stop molding wasn’t a strip tacked in place but was actually part of the doorjamb. What this meant was we had to rip out the whole doorjamb to gain any width.

To remove a door jamb, here’s what you do:

1. First, remove the casing—the molding around the outside of the doorjamb. To do this, I used a rubber mallet to tap a putty knife into the joint between the molding and adjacent pieces of wood to break the paint seal, then used a prybar to pull the molding away. In some cases, I had to slip a chisel in to widen the gap enough to get the prybar in.
2. In our case, the casing had two parts: some raised trim around the edges (what I like to think of as “crown molding for the doorway”) and three flat boards surrounding the actual door opening. I thus had to start with the raised trim, walk that all the way around (where I could—the door was butted against a wall, so I had to leave some trim until later), then remove the flat boards.
3. Once I did that and caught my breath, I had to repeat the process on the other side of the doorway.
4. Finally, I removed the jamb. Usually the instructions for this read “pry out the jamb and use a reciprocating saw to cut through any stubborn nails.” In my case, I wasn’t able to get leverage to get any of the three pieces of the jamb out, so I cheated. I made a cut about a foot from the top of the left upright piece with the reciprocating saw, pried out the bottom piece, removed the top piece, the top part of the jamb, then the right part of the jamb.

Easy as pie. It only took one whole day.

So what’s next? Well, in our immediate future, we have a 30.5″ hole through which we can fit a fridge. Once we find a reliable carpenter, we’ll have him make a mirror of the arch that leads into the same hallway. Beats having a narrow doorjamb where there’s no need for an actual door.

Incidentally, shout out to JM and A for recommending the Sawzall, which was our reciprocating saw of choice for this operation. Best home improvement tool I ever had. Maybe even better than the crowbar.

Item 1: We have broadband again. The Comcast setup was pretty straightforward, though the tech did wear out a drill battery trying to punch a hole in our wall to install the jack. (We have a house that’s framed with “seasoned wood,” apparently the 1941 equivalent of pressure treated lumber, and the installer said it was definitely on his top 10 lists of most difficult walls to drill through ever. It didn’t help that he decided to go through a stud.)

Item 2: We also have a phone. After Saturday’s adventures with the junction block, I enlisted the help of Charlie, a friendly neighbor who also happens to be an electrician. He showed me a thing or two about troubleshooting, to wit: (1) the wiring to the kitchen jack was shot, (2) I had not connected the outside wires to the right spot on the junction box. We did get one jack working, so I have as a project to re-wire the kitchen jack. It’s all a straight shot above the ceiling, so it will be relatively straightforward. I’m going to take the opportunity to install a little switchblock from Leviton to make the process a little more managable. (For a great discussion of different structured wiring setups, check out HouseInProgress.)

Item 3: We still don’t have a refrigerator. The second one that came proved to have case parts that extended beyond the width of our doorways and couldn’t be removed, contrary to what the salesman had told me when I went, tape in hand, to pick out a fridge that would fit. We “fired” that appliance store and are now proceeding with a new two-part plan. First, I’ll get my crowbar and remove some of the trim from the offending doorway so we get another inch or two of room. Second, I think we’ll try Sears. From what our next door neighbor told me, their installers seem likelier to attempt creative solutions to get appliances into rooms.

Saturday we both woke up sweating about the appliances. The doors throughout our house, a 1941 Cape Cod that we bought from the original owner’s son and that had been occupied by a family member since it was built, are narrow—the door into the living room from the front is about 31 inches, the widest door into the kitchen is 27 inches, and the door into the utility room where the washer and drier would go is only about 26. We dashed to Home Depot to enquire about installing a new door. Fortunately a very patient Irishman in the door and window department informed us that it should be much simpler—all they should have to do to move the fridge inside would be to take the doors off.

That was good news, because we had to quickly dash south to meet Lisa’s parents halfway and pick up our dogs. We got back from that errand at around 3, only to find that the visit from Verizon had failed to get our phone working. He muttered something ominous on the call about some wiring being missing.

A trip back out to the box confirmed what he said. When I had checked the network interface the first time, I failed to note the absence of any wiring leading out of the NIB into the house. Yep, there was absolutely nothing connecting the network interface box to the house. I moped for a while, then went inside and “walked the wire” from where the connection in the kitchen dropped into the garage, through the utility room, and into the storage room where an, erm, “antique” phone block was connected to the ceiling. Next to it, a strain relief tube had been passed through next to the window.

Inspiration struck, and I ran to the Home Depot for some Cat-3 outdoor grade wire. I connected it to the NIB, ran it along the house into the strain relief tube, and tried to figure out how to connect it to the old phone block.

And there the story ends for now, because even after trying a couple of variations I can’t get the darned dial tone to go. Oh well. This is probably a good opportunity to look at structured wiring options, and quickly. Our cell phones don’t work so well up on the hill.

Day three in the new house, and I’m down at the Starbucks in Arlington getting some coffee ground and downloading all my email. We still don’t have phone or cable at the house; more on that in a second.

The closing on Friday went very smoothly and we celebrated with lunch at Legal Seafoods. The rest of the afternoon was spent assembling our bed, getting most of the bedroom unpacked, and taking a whirlwind trip to Home Depot and Best Buy. We ended up purchasing a washer and drier and a refrigerator. And I guess what they say about “buy in haste” is true, at least regarding the fridge. But at the time we didn’t have a chance to secondguess ourselves; we had to dash back to Arlington to change and then downtown to the North End and Paolo Diecidue’s new place, Via Valverde (no web presence yet). I’ll write more about that trip later.